Welcome back to week 7 of my Dungeon 23 challenge! This week, we get the first real look at the "second" storyline to this megadungeon, the ancient Dwarvish expedition into the realm that the Priory has been built into (or has itself created around it...), as represented by a strange brass mill:
Last week, the pumice rapids broke the 5-room dungeon format we've been following to instead present an area with 5 different random encounters that could be experienced by the party when they traverse and re-traverse the area. This week, the Mill also breaks the format a little: we once again return to five "rooms" of entrance, puzzle, red herring, climax, and payoff, but this time, they're all in the same physical room. I've done this for two reasons. First, for fictional cohesion, I wanted there to be a Dwarven mill somewhere in the dungeon, but it didn't really make sense for a steam engine powering a grind wheel to be this gargantuan 5-room complex. Second, for gameplay reasons, I wanted to have a whole dungeon contained in a single room to reward exploration. It would be easy to overlook the Mill on a quick pass through the northern parts of this map, so I wanted there to be an interesting discovery for players that bothered to poke around a bit.
Beyond this, the Mill is a fairly straightforward OSR-style encounter: a magic trap that only hits you if you are greedy, a puzzle with no built-in solution (how do you get in the sphere?), then a lying demon that tries to trick you back into the greed trap or, failing that, pummeling you with its thagomizer. Then, should the party prevail, they are left with a choice: slay the demon and be rewarded with magic weapons, but also impact the dungeon's ability to process food (leading to potential conflict in town). Or, let the demon live, and gain a slightly dark ability to tweak one's mercurial magic.
For those not familiar with DCC, mercurial magic is an extensive list of random effects that get applied to each spell a wizard learns, and which is unique to that wizard. If you roll well when learning a fire spell, for example, you might gain a spell that also heals you a bit, but if you roll poorly, you might kill an NPC each time you cast it! I'm a big fan of mercurial magic and how it helps make magic feel unpredictable, as well as letting two wizards have similar spells but not feel like copies of each other. However, some of the effects render spells almost useless, so I always like to add an in-game ability to re-roll them if the players want.
That's all for this week - next time, we'll have a look at the Deepcrossing, a fortified stronghold of the Basalt soldiers and the main source of conflict in this upper layer of the dungeon.
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